Norman Yakeleya

Mr. Speaker, any type of business in the Northwest Territories, there are some very good, hardworking business people, and sometimes it makes it very difficult for them to thrive and have growth in the Northwest Territories. I talk about the various businesses such as here and around the outlying area where we had the outfitters business. Because of the decline of the caribou due to a number of factors related to the mining, to transportation, to hunting of bison, the outfitters came and asked the government to have a look at some kind of consideration to offset it because their business isn’t...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I too want to finish off this week with words of encouragement mostly to our small business people in the Northwest Territories, especially to the ones in the Sahtu region.

We have small business owners in Deline who guide people for world-class fishing. We have people in Tulita work in the business to serve the oil and gas sector of the government. We have business people in Colville Lake, where the best furs in Canada are trapped. These young trappers are business people. We also have business people in Fort Good Hope looking after the community through the housing...

There are also other trappers in the North, you know, waiting for the snow to come. I guess they’re in the same situation as Colville Lake.

I just want to ask the Minister if he will give any consideration to the invitation to trappers from Colville Lake to go down to visit an auction type of sale that goes on when they have that event. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, I want to register my comments, I guess, on this one here. It has to do with the North Slave Correctional Centre, the security fencing. The justification for this versus some of our own communities’ needs of correction in the small communities and the types of situations where our justice programs and services, things that we want to do in our small communities are always falling off the table because of no money or we just don’t do it this year, and we have a facility that’s here that the department wants to, for their reasons and their own justifications, put a $2 million fence to...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to say to the Minister, certainly the health centre’s flooring replacement in Fort Good Hope is much appreciated and needed. I know I did do some visits. This was actually a couple of years ago, so I’m glad it has been looked at. It has been dealt with and I appreciate it.

At the same time, when I visit the health centre facilities in Tulita, I am hoping that we would look at more urgent need because of the progress that I’ve tabled to the Minister, not to have our hardworking nurses cohabit with mice in the communities within the centres there. That’s very...

This is just a quick comment here on the child and family services and the shelters and what you’re calling group homes. I know we don’t have those emergency shelters in the communities and I just want to ask the Minister, in his future discussions with the department and communities in the Sahtu health board, if there are designated emergency shelters and if there are some empty facilities, some empty homes in some of our communities where some of the families are taken out of the community, and there are some people left, also, could be deemed homeless if they moved to Yellowknife. We’re in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to table photographs of the Tulita health facility showing some mousetraps and other things of interest.

I would also like to table a document, called “Oil and Gas: Contaminated Drinking Water Linked to Faulty Wells, Not Fracking.”

In dealing with the small business people in the Sahtu, there are figures here that I have that show the income support rates have fallen by 50 percent in Tulita in 2012 and 20 percent in Norman Wells. It’s because of these small business people that hire people in our communities to work because of the oil and gas exploration.

I want to ask the Minister, given these kinds of stats and figures that we have produced by the government, are there opportunities for the business people in the Sahtu so that they can continue to keep their businesses alive, sort of have it on the health respirator so...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In support of the business people in the Sahtu, I want to ask the Minister of ITI, given that we have we have a smorgasbord of business people in the Sahtu, some with the traditional economy, some with the wage economy, and in light of the slowdown of the oil and gas, because that’s been the economic driver for the past couple of years of committing and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the Sahtu, has this department taken on the task of doing sort of a lessons learned from this type of activity, because we’re hoping that the companies will be coming back but...

Mr. Chair, I just want to make a comment to the Minister. When I met with the Colville Lake leadership and they talked about the Fur Program, they are very pleased. Just before the opening of this Assembly, I contacted Colville Lake and I met some of them in Norman Wells and they are really excited. It was just like Christmastime because the snow was coming and they were getting ready and will be going out to the traplines and setting them up, and they said there’s a lot of excitement in the air. That attests to what the Minister says and what the department is saying about the furs that the...